Sociology has been curiously silent about the concept of luck. The present article argues that this omission is, in fact, an oversight: An explicit and systematic engagement with luck provides a more accurate portrayal of the social world, opens potentially rich veins of empirical and theoretical inquiry, and offers a compelling alternative for challenging dominant meritocratic frames about inequality and the distribution of rewards. This article develops a framework for studying luck, first by proposing a working definition of luck, examining why sociology has ignored luck in the past, and making the case for the value of including luck in sociology’s conceptual repertoire. The article then demonstrates the fertile research potential of studying luck by identifying a host of research questions and hypotheses pertaining to the social construction of luck, the real effects of luck, and theoretical interventions related to luck. It concludes by highlighting the distinctive contributions sociology can make to the growing interdisciplinary interest in this topic.

社会学对运气的概念一直保持沉默。本文认为，这种疏忽实际上是一种疏忽：运气的明确和系统的参与提供了对社会世界的更准确的刻画，打开了可能丰富的经验和理论探究的脉络，并为挑战主导者提供了令人信服的选择关于不平等和奖励分配的精英制框架。本文首先提出运气的定义，研究为什么社会学过去忽略了运气，并提出了将运气纳入社会学概念表述的价值的观点，从而为研究运气建立了一个框架。然后，本文通过确定与运气的社会结构，运气的实际影响以及与运气相关的理论干预等一系列研究问题和假设，证明了研究运气的广阔研究潜力。在总结中，我们着重指出了社会学可以为该学科日益增长的跨学科兴趣做出的独特贡献。